Hello, first time posting here. Not sure if this question is relevant for this website's purposes, but here goes.

A little backstory: Because of my passion for game creation all my life, I have written down, brainstormed, created stories and thought up many intricate game ideas and have dreams to create a game business in order to become a Game Designer/Director (entrepreneurship, basically).

However, I want to make sure that game creation is something that I really want to do. I don't want to go to school and spend all this money only to realize that maybe game creation is not up my ally.

Therefore, I figured that the best way to see if game creation is right for me is to try it out myself (since I am a great Self-teacher/learner) by starting small and taking baby steps in the programming department (maybe to create fan games or something). If I want to be a game director, I feel that I need to at least be able to understand and communicate with the programming side of game creation.

The problem is that I want to get into programming, but I have no programming knowledge whatsoever, but want to learn. You can say that I want to teach myself this to somewhat “prepare” for what is to come in the future (hopefully), but don't know where to begin. Therefore, I would definitely like some advice as to maybe books, websites, and other sources for someone who wants to self-teach themselves programming and game design.

http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercises/0 is a good place to start for basics. Once you feel more comfortable writing code, start looking at alternate languages and libraries such as C# with XNA, Python with Alice, Unity and UDK.

This is a great book that I've been going through myself. Code Academy and Khan Academy are both great, but at moments can be a bit overwhelming for those who are absolutely new to programming. The site is great because it really breaks down every single line of code and how things work.

Also, check out the full catalog of Educational content at http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/. You can filter the "Dev Content" area by various game development areas. You'll find a number of Hands-on labs that take you from File|New Project to completed game (Ex. Catapult Wars). There's also content there that spans building XNA games for Xbox and Windows as well.